For Opacity

Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Nathaniel Mary Quinn

This show focuses on three artists—Elijah Burgher (b. 1978, Kingston, NY), Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985, Nigeria), and Nathaniel Mary Quinn (b. 1977, Chicago)—who explore diverse identities in portraiture and who do so almost exclusively through the medium of drawing. Burgher, Ojih Odutola, and Quinn have entirely distinct stylistic approaches and personal backgrounds but are connected by the way they use drawing to investigate subjecthood as well as its resistance to depiction. Whether using a highly refined illusionistic approach (Burgher), a broad range of material techniques and media (Ojih Odutola), or a fractured composite aesthetic (Quinn), the artists in For Opacity investigate the relationship between insight and opacity, and what a surface can and cannot reveal.

Jennifer Wynne Reeves

All Right for Now

From the late 1990s until her too-early death from brain cancer in 2014, Jennifer Wynne Reeves (b. 1963, Royal Oak, MI) developed a reputation as a painter’s painter, garnering an intense and loyal following especially among fellow artists who appreciated her ability to load errant scribbles and globs of crusty paint with humor, narrativity, and poignant emotional affect. Her first museum show in New York, The Drawing Center exhibition will be a long overdue consideration of Reeves’s unique contribution to the dialogue between representation and abstraction that has preoccupied recent art. Featuring works on paper, Masonite, and wood, as well as notebooks and text pieces (Reeves wrote copiously and had a large fan base on Facebook), the exhibition will examine the power of line and color to render accessible deeply personal fears and desires.

Open Sessions 12

Installation shot of Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawings with Open Sessions, (detail), 2017.

Every two years Open Sessions invites artists and creative practitioners through an open call to consider their relationship to drawing as a medium, a process, and as a metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small-group exhibitions and a culminating museum show at The Drawing Center.

Open Sessions is organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.

Image: Installation shot of Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawings with Open Sessions, (detail), 2017.

The Lab
Dec 14, 2018
- Feb 03, 2019

Open Sessions 13

Installation shot of Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawings with Open Sessions, (detail), 2017.

Every two years Open Sessions invites artists and creative practitioners through an open call to consider their relationship to drawing as a medium, a process, and as a metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small-group exhibitions and a culminating museum show at The Drawing Center.

Open Sessions is organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.

Image: Installation shot of Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawings with Open Sessions, (detail), 2017.

Main Gallery
Feb 15, 2019
- Mar 17, 2019

Winter Term

Center for Urban Pedagogy

The Drawing Center’s Winter Term is an annual initiative in which the museum will partner with an artist or organization whose mission it is to explore the transformative role that drawing can play in civic and global society. The yearly program, which will consist of public events, classes, and performances as well as an exhibition, will build a community of people to investigate the efficacy of drawing as a tool for addressing inequity and encouraging social change. In a world ever more in need of human connection and compassion, Winter Term will ask how drawing, the most universal medium, might extend beyond the gallery space to provide concrete tools for collective engagement and collaboration. In this way, Winter Term provides a new model for exhibition making as well as for the role that art institutions can play in the real world.

The second session, planned for Winter 2019, will engage the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a Brooklyn-based organization that leverages graphic design and illustration to bring transparency to complex civic structures (ex. land use, labor rights, immigration rights, juvenile detention) in partnership with the communities impacted by them. The residency will feature an exhibition, in which the project will be broken-down visually from its conception through its design, testing and distribution via text, photographs, videos, and printed material, as well as a series of events geared towards individuals wishing to learn more about community-engaged design.

Neo Rauch

Aus dem Boden / From the Floor

Neo Rauch, Der Stammbaum, 2017. Oil on paper, 66 1/4 x 81 3/8 inches.

Neo Rauch is one of the best-known artists from the Leipzig school in Germany. His psychologically complex paintings have been widely collected and written about for more than twenty years. Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden / From the Floor will be the first exhibition of his drawings in the United States. A collaboration between The Drawing Center and the Des Moines Art Center, the show will be presented first in Des Moines from September 27, 2018–January 6, 2019, with the catalogue published and distributed at that time. In Spring 2019, the exhibition will travel to The Drawing Center where it will be on view in the Main Gallery and Drawing Room for four months.

Co-organized by Brett Littman, former Executive Director of The Drawing Center and Jeff Fleming, Director of the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Open Sessions 14

Installation shot of Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawings with Open Sessions, (detail), 2017.

Every two years Open Sessions invites artists and creative practitioners through an open call to consider their relationship to drawing as a medium, a process, and as a metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small-group exhibitions and a culminating museum show at The Drawing Center.

Open Sessions is organized by Rosario Güiraldes and Lisa Sigal, Open Sessions Curators.